WASHINGTON -- Though some politicians complain about unemployed people improperly collecting benefits, Americans laid off through no fault of their own actually save the United States government a lot of money when they don't collect benefits for which they are eligible.

In an eye-popping study for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, economists found that the amount of unclaimed benefits dwarfs improper payments. In 2009, the government overpaid unemployment claims by $11 billion. But if everyone eligible for benefits had collected that year, the cost to states would have been much higher.

"The additional expenditures in 2009, toward the end of the recent recession, would have been a whopping $108 billion," wrote economists David L. Fuller, B. Ravikumar and Yuzhe Zhang in their recent paper. "On average, the unclaimed benefits are much larger than the more frequently discussed overpayments."

"At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, it's outrageous to lose $17 billion worth of Unemployment Insurance dollars to overpayment and fraud," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said in a statement this summer, citing an overpayment figure for 2010.

Congress is debating whether to reauthorize federal unemployment insurance programs, which currently provide up to 43 weeks of additional benefits for workers who use up their 26 weeks of state benefits. Democrats want to include the extended benefits as part of a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff," the moment at the end of the year when big spending cuts and tax hikes are scheduled to take effect, potentially tipping the economy into a recession.

But keeping the benefits would cost $30 billion, and some Republicans suspect extended unemployment insurance has made life too easy for the jobless, some of whom might be fraudsters.

"It's easier for them to stay on unemployment than it is to work," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said last week. "I'm concerned about the high percentage of people who don’t even look for a job anymore. It's pretty amazing to me."

Asked by HuffPost if people game the system by collecting unemployment and other benefits for which they are not eligible, Hatch said they did. "There is some real gaming going on," he said, not citing evidence.

According to the National Employment Law Project, overpayments have accounted for 10.4 percent of all unemployment payments during the three-year period ending June 2011. Fraud represents less than 30 percent of overpayments, mostly occurring when claimants illegally keep their benefits after returning to work. Much of the rest of overpayments happen when employers fail to provide timely information about a worker's separation or when claimants fail to fulfill work-search requirements, according to NELP's analysis of Labor Department data.

Fuller, Ravikumar, and Zhang wrote that, on average, just 35 percent of the jobless have collected benefits over the past 22 years.

In some places, applying for benefits presents too much of a challenge. In Florida, for instance, tough new rules may discourage people from applying. The recipiency rate there has declined markedly since those new rules took effect last year.

In other cases, people without jobs are ineligible for benefits because they are new to the labor force or didn't work enough hours to qualify; some just don't apply. From 2007 through 2009, roughly 50 percent of people eligible for benefits successfully filed claims, a fraction Fuller and his co-authors say increased to a surprising 95 percent in 2011.

In the past year, as the government has trimmed benefits, the share of the unemployed population receiving compensation has fallen faster than the overall population of people without jobs. Of 12.3 million jobless, just 5 million received state or federal benefits in the week ending Nov. 24, according to the Labor Department. At the same time last year, more than 7 million of 13.6 million jobless received benefits. If Congress drops federal compensation, fewer than 1 in 3 unemployed Americans will be on the rolls at the start of next year.

HuffPost readers: Unemployed and not receiving benefits? Tell us about it -- email arthur@huffingtonpost.com. Please include your phone number if you're willing to be interviewed.

Additional reporting by Ryan Grim.

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What Could Fall Off The Fiscal Cliff

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In his last offer to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), President Barack Obama lobbied for $16 billion in cuts from the military's health care program, TRICARE. In 2012, the president also proposed hiking fees for military personnel and veterans who receive benefits under the program in an effort to help cut the defense budget. His proposal drew significant fire from Republican lawmakers and veterans' groups.

Both sides agreed to cuts from the military retirement program. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) claimed during July 2011 talks that lawmakers had reached a tentative deal to slash $11 billion. Under the current system, military personnel receive immediate retirement benefits after serving for 20 years. According to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, the appropriation cost per active military service member has increased at a higher rate than either inflation or the total pay package of private-sector employees. Given the budget constraints looming before the Defense Department, the CBO floated the idea of transitioning the military retirement program to a matching-payment model.

Cantor claimed that Republicans and Democrats had agreed to $36 billion in savings over 10 years from civilian retirement programs. The president proposed a marginally more modest figure of $33 billion in his final offer to House Speaker John Boehner. Just this year, Republicans in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also looked to find savings from the Federal Employee Retirement System by requiring employees to pay more of their salary into their pensions, which Democrats opposed as a pay cut that would make civil service less attractive for top talent.
In September 2011, the federal government employed over two million individuals, either through the cabinets or independent agencies. Many Republicans have complained that the federal workforce has ballooned during the Obama administration, and while the raw number of employees has risen by 14.4 percent between Sept. 2007 and Sept. 2011, the percentage of public employees out of the total civilian workforce has remained fairly constant around 1.2 percent since 2001. Much of the raw growth has been concentrated in the Department of Defense, Veteran's Affairs and Homeland Security.

Democrats and Republicans agreed to cut as much as $30 billion from agricultural subsidies; the main opposition fell along geographical lines rather than partisan ones. Hailing from an agriculture-heavy state, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) threatened to pull out of talks entirely if a deal included that much in subsidy reduction. The president ended up pushing for $33 billion in cuts, but that figure also included reductions in conservation programs. Baucus now tells HuffPost any cuts should be made through the farm bill, not fiscal cliff talks.

Cantor pushed hard for significant cuts to food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He charged that the federal government could save as much as $20 billion over ten years by eliminating waste and fraud, but the White House countered that the real number was closer to $2 billion. Instead, those cuts would force the program to scale back on the number of enrollees and the level of benefits it could offer.

Obama proposed cutting $4 billion from flood assistance funding in his final offer to Boehner in July 2011. But Hurricane Sandy straining the National Flood Insurance Program; The New York Times reports that thousands of claims are being submitted daily, which could send the overall cost upwards of $7 billion for a program that suffers from a ballooning debt problem. And with climate change promising future flooding disasters along the eastern seaboard, cutting the program looks unwise.

The president offered to cut $110 billion over the next decade from the government's health care spending, excluding Medicare. Among the programs that could lose crucial funding is home health care, where Democrats and Republicans agreed to $50 billion in reductions over ten years. Cantor pushed for closer to $300 billion in spending cuts to health care, but Democrats appeared to stand firm.

The president proposed cutting $10 billion from higher education over the next decade, mostly from Pell grants. Over nine million students relied on federal subsidized loans to afford college during the 2010-2011 school year, and the skyrocketing costs have continued to diminish the purchasing power of the Pell grant program. Obama has actively worked to make college more affordable for lower-income students. Key Republican lawmakers have attempted to cut funding for student loans; most notably, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) slashed the maximum award from $5,550 per student per year down to just $3,040.

The original funding levels proposed by Cantor and the GOP leadership would turn the entitlement program for America's poor into little more than a block grant program, Democrats claimed during the 2011 debt ceiling talks. Under such a program, they argued that states would then drop more people from enrollment and scale back on health benefits. In fiscal year 2009, over 62 million Americans -- many of them children -- depended on Medicaid for their health care. But the president did agree to $110 billion in cuts from Medicaid and other health programs.

Republicans pushed for a drastic overhaul to the entitlement program for America's seniors. Ryan infamously proposed turning Medicare into little more than a voucher system in which seniors would receive checks to purchase their own health care on the open market -- a plan that would ultimately force individuals to shoulder more of the burden for their health care costs.
Democrats refused to accept changes similar to those in Ryan's plan. The president, however, was more open to other GOP suggestions on Medicare. In his final offer to Boehner, he agreed cut $250 billion over the next ten years -- in part by increasing premiums for higher-income seniors and by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67 (although over a longer time frame).

Republicans have again and again decried any attempt to raise taxes, either on the highest earners or on corporations. (A Democracy Corps/Campaign for America's Future survey shows that 70 percent of voters support raising taxes on the wealthiest two percent of Americans.) Instead, Boehner has pushed for a comprehensive tax reform bill that would lower the marginal tax rates while closing loopholes and eliminating deductions in order to raise around $800 billion in additional revenues. For many Democrats, that figure simply isn't enough. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced Tuesday that the president was aiming for as much as $1.6 trillion in new revenues, and the president told reporters on Wednesday that it would be practically impossible to raise the amount of revenue he wanted simply from closing loopholes and lowering rates.

Social Security isn't driving the deficit, yet Republicans have pursued drastic changes to the program. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has promised that Social Security would be off the table in the on-going negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff, but Obama did concede to tying the benefits to a recalculated Consumer Price Index that would ultimately provide less money to retirees. Sen. Bernie Sanders claims that, under such a measure, seniors who are currently 65 years-old would see their benefits drop by $560 a month in 10 years and by as much as $1,000 in 20 years. The Moment of Truth project (led by the two former co-chairs of the president's deficit reduction commission, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles) claims that the recalculated CPI could save as much as $112 billion from Social Security over the next ten years.

Although Cantor and other GOP House members demanded that any deficit-reduction deal brokered in 2011 be classified as revenue-neutral, they were open to closing particular loopholes in the corporate tax code and limiting itemized deductions for individuals -- given that they were offset by other tax cuts. Out of the $50 billion in savings to be found over the next decade from closing loopholes, Cantor proposed getting $3 billion from eliminating the break for corporate-jet owners and another $20 billion from voiding the subsidies for the oil and gas industries.
On the individual earner side, he proposed eliminating the second-home mortgage deduction for $20 billion, as well as limiting the mortgage deduction for higher-income households to rake in another $20 billion. He also offered to tighten the tax treatment of retirement accounts.
But Democrats wanted to see even greater action taken on itemized deductions. In June 2011, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) proposed raising $130 billion in new revenues by capping itemized deductions at 35 percent for the highest income brackets. The GOP response to his proposal at the time was a resounding "no."

Set to expire on Dec. 31, 2012, the Bush tax cuts represent one of the most controversial elements of the so-called fiscal cliff. They added over $1.8 trillion to the deficit between 2002 and 2009. Yet Republicans argue that an extension is necessary to create jobs and spur economic growth. But a study from the Congressional Research Service found that tax cuts for the wealthiest earners had little economic effect.
The White House is pushing for a renewal only of those tax breaks for the lower- and middle-class Americans in order to save the average middle-class family between $2,000 and $3,500 next year. Letting the cuts expire for those earning over $250,000 a year -- or the wealthiest two percent of Americans -- would haul in $950 billion in savings over the next decade, according to the CBO. Obama stressed how much the country stood to gain from such an approach Wednesday during a press conference.
"If we right away say 98 percent of Americans are not going to see their taxes go up — 97 percent of small businesses are not going to see their taxes go up," he said. "If we get that in place, we're actually removing half of the fiscal cliff."